Homo chickens

Leaving aside last week's big foofaraw, there are good reasons why normal people should buy their fast-food chicken only at Chick-fil-A.

Chief among those reasons is the Chick-fil-A guarantee that they'll never serve you any meat that might have come from a homo chicken.

All Chick-fil-A chicken comes from regular old hetero chickens, just as the Bible prescribes.

It's an important guarantee, even if you aren't totally grossed out by the idea of eating a chicken that did all the disgusting things that homo chickens do back when it was alive.

There's only a very small chance that you'll get full-blown chicken-transmitted AIDS from eating poorly prepared homo chicken parts at one of those other franchises — at Popeye's, say, or Church's, or KFC — but you can never be 100 per cent sure with those other chicken outlets. You can with Chick-fil-A.

Well, maybe not 100 per cent because it's always remotely possible that an otherwise normal hetero chicken who got it from a blood transfusion — or would that be a broth transfusion? — got past the patented Chick-fil-A chicken sex-pref screening equipment that identifies and separates out homo chicken parts.

That screening equipment, called a Chicken Sex-o-meter, is very nearly foolproof. If the chicken was gay, the Sex-o-meter will finger the rascal. Alarms will go off. You'll be spared the indignity.

The Sex-o-meter consists of a kind of scale onto which every piece of Chick-fil-A chicken is deposited and examined on its way to breading. The scale "reads" the chicken part and activates a pointer, which like a compass needle arcs into one of three marked areas shown on an overhead monitor. One of those areas, the smallish one to the left, is marked "Homo," the big one to the right is marked "Hetero" and between them there's a tiny wedge marked "Iffy."

I'm told that a chicken part might fall into the "Iffy" area if the live chicken it came from was bi. Or a latent homo chicken. Or a reformed homo chicken. Or a rooster that Ted Haggard took indecent advantage of.

The pointer will swing wildly back and forth if the chicken piece came from a hermaphrodite chicken. The pointer won't react at all if the nugget or strip came from a transgender chicken, possibly because there are no transgender chickens. A chicken couldn't afford a sex-change operation, and no insurance company would pay for it, and no chicken owner, however fond he or she might be of the chicken wanting the operation, would agree to that kind of outlay for a creature with so brief a life expectancy.

It's said that the Sex-o-meter is just as effective in identifying homo catfish, but none of the big catfish chains give much of a damn about the nad proclivities of their stock. Nobody gives much of a damn about any aspect of catfish sex because it's so weird and so different from our own. The Bible is utterly silent on the subject, so it's chicken sex not catfish sex that gets all the time on the Sex-o-meter.

The Bible does specifically condemn chicken homoism as an abomination, perhaps even more abominable than the human variety, this being attributable to the persistent rumors about St. Paul and to the all-boy make-up of the Inner Circle. One of the newer translations favored by charismatics avers that everybody at the Last Supper got a take-out box of guaranteed not-homo chicken to go along with the more important, more symbolic but less filling comestibles.

Also, one of the dietary laws of Leviticus proscribed homo chicken, but that verse was removed because the King James translators could make no sense of it, having been totally in the dark about the homoism that ran rampant in ancient fowl. So rather than leaving the space blank where the Lord had inveighed against homo chicken-eating, the translators filled it with another insult to the pig.

Colonel Harlan Sanders wanted to exclude homo chickens but at the time he assembled his 11 herbs and spices there was no way to determine whether a drumstick or a gizzard was from a homo chicken, a hetero one, or one that liked to cross-dress, had a mug like a bulldog, smoked cigars, and ran the FBI.

I know that a chicken under hypnosis can be induced to reveal its sex prefs, but I'm frankly skeptical of these ex post chickeno claims for the Chicken Sex-o-meter. If the analysts can't be sure about the Shroud of Turin, they're bound to be even less sure about chicken gaiety.

But the Sex-o-meter is said to be the product of high-quality scientific research – the same faith-based research that proved climate change is a hoax and the earth is only 6,000 years old — and the screening results are regularly reviewed and attested by a blue-ribbon panel of experts that includes David Barton, David Gergen, Donald Wildmon, Marcus Bachmann, Glenn Beck, Michelle Duggar, Foghorn Leghorn, and Lillie, who might've been the last of the celebrated tic-tac-toe chicken clan that first found fame at the IQ Zoo at Hot Springs 60 years ago.

One of those experts has confided to the National Enquirer a belief that the Sex-o-meter works to some extent by hunch, and that virtually all the chickens adjudged to have been homos were, in life, either cocks with prissy walks or butch hens.

Speaking of Chick-fil-A

The Little Rock Police Department has identified the carjacking suspect shot by a police officer Wednesday after a chase from Home Depot to the drive-through line of a nearby Chick-fil-A in West Little Rock. /more/

A food snob conducts an experiment to see what the Chick-Fil-A fuss is all about. /more/

After checking their analytics, Brasher and Rowe decide to go hyperlocal in their column, suggesting new ideas for Little Rock. These include a memorial statute outside Chick-Fil-A, a fighting tournament, and a deer stand on top of Pinnacle Mountain. /more/

Two things this week. First is Oliver Sacks' brief essay in the New York Times about his approaching death from terminal cancer. Sacks, 81, made his career studying and writing about the nearly infinite varieties of neurological oddities that can arise within the human mind (he wrote the book "Awakenings" and "The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat"), which makes him uniquely well-positioned to comment on the psychological condition of facing mortality. What experience could possibly be weirder than that, after all? Synesthesia and visual agnosia surely have nothing on the knowledge of approaching death. /more/

The Friday Five open line is here, and we're talking restaurant sales numbers. You can talk about whatever you'd like. /more/

What will Mike Huckabee say? Will Republicans now have a new obligatory foodstuff for tailgate parties? Chick-fil-A CEO Dan Cathy, prompted in part by a talk with a gay friend and also by business realities, now indicates he made a mistake in getting involved in the same-sex marriage debate. /more/

The Chipotle Mexican Grill fast food chain filed a request with the city of Little Rock Monday for approval for a new restaurant on the southwest corner of Markham and University, a site now occupied by the Baker Building, built originally as the Fausett Building. /more/

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Bob Lancaster, one of the Arkansas Times longest and most valued contributors, retired from writing his column last week. We’ll miss his his contributions mightily. Look out, in the weeks to come, for a look back at some of his greatest hits. In the meantime, here's a good place to start.

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My colleagues John Ray and Jesse Bacon and I estimate, in the first analysis of its kind for the 2018 election season, that the president's waning popularity isn't limited to coastal cities and states. The erosion of his electoral coalition has spread to The Natural State, extending far beyond the college towns and urban centers that voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016. From El Dorado to Sherwood, Fayetteville to Hot Springs, the president's approval rating is waning.